


My Body and Your Brain

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: AU, Other, Post-Serenity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-29
Updated: 2011-04-29
Packaged: 2017-10-18 18:56:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/192142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a ficathon about sentient spaceships. After the events of the movie, there have been some changes in personnel and equipment.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Body and Your Brain

SIMON: _My sister’s a ship. We had a complicated childhood._

PREVIOUSLY:  
Jayne had always liked to swim: his body threading into burning cold, and adapting it into warmth; surrounded by a medium, restfully held up in it or stroking into it for a more active form of transport. Lucky the way that turned out.

1  
“Awww, FUCK!” Jayne said. “I can’t move and I can’t see. Is it dark in here or am I blind?”

“Well,” Simon said, “You’re not blind, exactly. You just need some retraining, to get used to the…new situation. They tell me that it’ll just take a few hours of training to get you up and running. Get you used to the visual output, and the sensors, and the servomechanisms….But that’s not the real problem. Which is that, for most intents and purposes, you’re dead.”

“Jesus, Simon, that’s how they taught you to be tactful, that fancy upbringing of yours? And if I’m dead, does that mean I’m in Hell, with **you**? That purely ain’t fair. Who do I complain to? I’m gonna shove Vera right up his halo and…”

“For what it’s worth, I’m not dead. You’ll…as far as we know, your memories will return gradually, but probably with some retrograde amnesia around the, uh, around the event. To review the bidding, there were nine of us. Then Book died. Then Wash died. Then when we went to Mr. Universe’s complex to broadcast the signal…Most of us—except for River and Inara--ended up in the hospital afterwards. Kaylee got out pretty fast. She was shot in the throat, but her breathing wasn’t compromised and they repaired her larynx. It’s perfect. I couldn’t have done a better job myself. Zoe was, depressed of course, physically she had some orthopedic problems even though I could stabilize on the battlefield with the presfoam…well, I guess you don’t want to know about that. I was shot in the abdomen…”

“Gut-shot, huh?” Jayne said. “You too?”

“Yeah. Around Serenity, it’s like the merit badge. Or the secret handshake. Mal had a variety of blunt and incisive traumata, from blades as well as bullet holes.”

“Uh-huh. Get to the good part. So, I’m in the sickbay, and any minute now, Mal’s gonna come in here and tell you to patch me up faster so I can get back to work?”

“We’re not on Serenity. After a couple of days in the hospital, it emerged…it became increasingly clear that….you…ummm, you weren’t going to make it.”

“So that’s how I got dead, or practically dead? Because of the one time in your life when you did crappy work?”

“Jayne, believe me, your surgery was not my responsibility, I was enjoying a refreshing bout of unconsciousness at the time. But I was awake a little later, and before quite all of the plugs were pulled, I was able to prevail upon them to, well…How shall I put this? This is the…you’re…the Gnat Class Coupe, _Kaylee’s Good Boy._ Which is a good segue…”

Biting his lip, Simon flicked the switches that triggered the inboard sensors. There was a warning hum, like a Pekingese poised to strike, and then Jayne said, “Hey! I can see you! You and the inside of your crap shoebox!”

“Good,” Simon said, ignoring the last part. “All right. I’m surrendering manual control. Point-two-five percent acceleration, please, Jayne.”

“How do I do that?”

“It’s like the centipede who couldn’t figure out which leg went where…just do it,” Simon said, and he was glad to see that the readout bar stretched out longer. “Uhh…that was about three percent I think. Take it down. Good. Now two percent pitch, please. Good.”

“Looks like I got the knack. Hey, Serenity didn’t have no person livin’ inside her, did she? I’d a remembered a person.”

“You’re quite right about that. The Firefly class is entirely mechano-cybernetic and relies on human pilots. The more expensive marque within the Gnat Class can have a humanoid intelligence guidance system. A HIGS. Jayne, what’s the fastest way from here to Dyton Colony?”

“That a trick question? ‘Cause the fastest way is over to Sector Four and loop past Kallikos, but it’s only fastest if there ain’t no asteroids in the asteroid belt and none o’ them Reaver sightings in Five happen again. Hey, how’d I know that?”

“It’s in the basic Guidance module for the HIGS.”

“And the Alliance just gave you one o’them flyin’ pigs, the thanks of a grateful nation?”

“Well, no, although they did let Mal get Serenity back in the air, which sounds almost as implausible. The papers are in the name of one of Inara’s guildsisters, but it, you, uh, the ship, belongs to me, and I paid for the installation.”

“I call bullshit, Doc. You said they crashed your bank accounts. Well, OK, you also told us some stuff about gettin’ at River that made you sound even more pathetic than you really was. But back to the money? You were holdin’ out about that? ‘Cause I woulda played cards with you for money ‘stead of chores, I’da thought you had any.”

“I didn’t have any, then. First I went to my parents. I humiliated myself, and I groveled, and I think there was some check-forgery going on…”

“You’re a real hard case, Simon,” Jayne said.

“It’s the company I keep. And then I went to everybody I ever knew, and re-launched the humiliation and groveling sub-routine, and called in every favor I could, and, fortunately outside the strictly incestuous degrees of consanguinity, sexual favors were demanded and…that must be what being a movie producer is like.”

“Hey, y’know what I think? You got what you want. Finally got inside me,” Jayne said. “Caught you lookin’ sometimes, in the shower and such.”

“In some ways, you were a fine figure of a man,” Simon said. “And it happened just the way I bet you said it would. Over your dead body.”

“That why you did it?” Jayne asked.

“No, of course not. I need a ship of my own. Because when we got out of the hospital, the numbers of our little band were depleted even more than we’d expected. They thought there was a fair exchange. River. They treated us in the hospital, they let Mal keep his ship, but they kept River. So I’m going to get her back.”

“Why not with Serenity, though? Mal ain’t on board with your plan, huh?”

“No. In terms of River, he said that we’d caused trouble enough for him and his. The ones that were left. And in terms of you… He said he’d buried plenty of good men and bad men, and the decent thing to do was to let the dead rest and move along and try not to envy them too much.”

2  
On that note, Simon took a lunch break and checked over the course for the next exercise in the Shake-Down Cruise Wizard. Jayne triggered the Internal Monitor cameras and guffawed. “What’s that on your face?”

“Told you I was a traditionalist,” Simon said. “It won’t defeat a retinal scan, of course, but it does make me look a little different, and if someone is working off multiple-generation copies of a Wanted poster…”

“That’s near as funny as Wash’s lip ferret, rest him. There’s just something laughable about a pilot with a mustache. Dunno why. Not that you’re really a pilot. More my assistant.”

“Just for your reference, big shot, any HIGS function is subject to manual presets and override, which requires someone with hands.”

“Gotcha. So I can’t kill ya while you’re sleepin’.”

Simon shivered at the memory. “Yes, it’s good to know there’s someone in the ‘Verse who can’t. As soon as the activation process is complete, we’ll…get moving. Get the show on the road.”

“You actually got a plan? That’d make a change.”

“I’m…we’ll…have to improvise. First we’ll go back to the Academy. No, before you start…”

“Didn’t say nothin’” Jayne said.

“Of course I don’t know if they took her back there.” (He didn’t say, “I don’t know if she’s still alive,” because what would be the point?) “In some ways, that’s the last place they’d put her. Because it’s already been proved pregnable. But they might be going for a triple bluff…I’ll try to re-activate my old contacts…”

“Bet they’ll be glad to see you, too.”

“Yes, the thought had occurred to me, thank you Herr Von Clausewitz. But now that I’ve re-established contact with my family, however awkwardly, that’s a second front. So, if she contacts them, or if they have any news, I’ll have access to that.”

“If that’s meant for an inspirational talk, it ain’t workin’.”

“’We few, we happy few’…Did you ever hear of…no, of course you didn’t. Well, there was a playwright, long ago, on Earth that Was. A different playwright, that is. This one was famous, even though he was very left-wing and a vegetarian and wore funny clothes. And a beautiful actress told him that they should get together and have the perfect child—with her body and his brain. And he just shot her down in flames, because he said, what if it had **his** body and her brain? So here we are, Jayne. You are glued inside a tin can, and River’s fate depends on my aptitude for derring-do. Which means we’re basically all fucked, but we’ll all just play the cards we’re dealt, OK?”

“See, that’s your trouble right there. You need to be able to reach over and grab the other guy’s chips. And his cards, if you like ‘em better’n yours.”

3  
“I like it better when I can see stars,” Jayne said. “It’s kind of amazin’, ain’t it? Dead light from a million years ago makin’ the whole sky look like live velvet. And bein’ the way I am now, I feel more like I’m on their level, ‘stead of a puny little thing that needs air to breathe.”

“I like it better when I can’t see them,” Simon said, thinking of clinging to Serenity’s thin skin with his head fathomlessly spinning with nothing to cling to in an Everywhere of horror. “But River always—River agreed—that is, I saw her agreeing in one past instance—with you about them.”

Simon was bounded in a nutshell, and Jayne was king of infinite space. The bad dreams weren’t a problem just at the moment, because Jayne neither slept nor woke, and Simon spent about ten hours a day under a blanket of sedatives, in the cupboard bed built into the ship’s hold. That left fourteen hours for mopping the floor and target practice and washing clothes and tai chi practice and searching the Cortex for clues. (He expected that, later on, when he had shreds of facts, he could collate those to a web.)

Simon still did the tai chi form that he learned from his tutor. He had always hated Front and Back Spine-Bending (“inhale and constrict all your muscles, including the facial muscles. Press your fists together. Dig your toes into the Earth like claws.”) Yes, the point was to trigger endorphins by letting the muscles relax and spring free, but he hated the gargoyle he became. And now the form never ended, and he was that person. All of the time.

4  
“Whatcha doin’ in there?” Jayne asked. “You got your back to the sensors and all.”

“Reading,” Simon said.

“Read it out,” Jayne said. “I got nothin’ to do right now. What is it?”

“David Copperfield. You remember, one of Shepherd Book’s Earth-that-Was artifacts. I packed it when I left Serenity.”

“Oh, sure, the one where the kid worked in a factory and then had a nutty old-maid aunt and two wives and made a pile writin’ books like that one. Practically the same thing happened to me. Well, ‘cept for the books and the two wives. The factory and the loony maiden aunt thing, though.”

“I’m in the middle,” Simon said. “I’m not going to start over for you.”

“Yeah, yeah, just read.”

Simon cleared his throat and started reading in the middle of a sentence on page 248.  
The reading only confirmed his suspicion that having to leave Serenity had its advantages. He feared that Kaylee and Dora were sisters under the skin (and clearly nothing but Mal’s iron will stood between her and a terrifying muttonphagous lapdog). Another terror cast Inara as Agnes and himself as Uriah Heep.

“Hey, talkin’ ‘bout stuff you inherited up for yourself, where’s Vera? You got her?”

“No. Mal does. All of your weapons.”

“Now, if that ain’t just you all over, Doc. You leave behind a coupla dozen perfectly good weapons, and take a dead preacher’s books includin’ a Bible you didn’t believe in to start with and can’t stand to look at now and meanwhile you without a gun.”

“Oh, I have a gun all right. A .38 auto. But it’s a thing. I don’t anthropomorphize…”

“That’s not what Kaylee said.”

“I mean, I don’t treat objects as if they were alive.”

“Like ships, for example?”

“You’re hilarious. Head us on over toward MK-223. Do you think you can handle the landing yourself, or do you want me to do it on manual?”

“What’s on MK-223?”

“Nothing. That’s the point.” _Kaylee’s Good Boy_ had a locker full of boiler-bag meals, but after the successful landing, Simon celebrated by buying fresh food in the market. It was so inconvenient trying to cook on the one small induction ring built over the one-cubic-foot cold unit, underneath the supply locker, that it killed a lot of time.

The food prep unit was about seven feet tall by three feet wide, which was pretty much the size of the cupboard bed, just rotated perpendicularly. Simon knew that the basic unit for building classical Japanese houses was the tatami mat. He suspected that the designers’ template for the Gnat class was a coffin.

“That was a surprisingly uneventful landing and takeoff series. Thank you, Jayne. And then nothing of an adventurous nature happened when I was there.”

“Hey, Daisy,” Jayne said. “Why’d you do it? Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to get a regular ship for this wild goose juggle? OK, you prolly can’t pilot worth crap, but you could put yourself out of your misery faster and for less of that money you had to go on your knees for, one way and another.”

“You’d been through a lot, and survived it,” Simon said. “Which, to me, indicated that it was worth a lot to you, to stay alive. Even if compromises were required. That, if I’d had the opportunity to ask you, you would have opted for some kind of life. For it not to be over. Jayne, for what it’s worth, you were the hero of your own life. I can’t say I exactly shared your valuation, but I think it’s fair to give you a chance to maintain it even after your life. Also, I just couldn’t stand any more losses.”

“It’s all about you! Call yourself a good man, but you just stuck me in here without so much as a by-your-leave.”

“No I don’t anymore, and, to coin a phrase, this ain’t the rutting town hall. Jayne, if, after River’s safe, you don’t want to keep flying…well, I’ll get you decommissioned or whatever. Or maybe there are, I don’t know, maybe there are girl ships.”

5  
“What’s all that racket?” Jayne asked. “At this rate, you’re gonna give me a headache.”

“When we went to MK-223, I got a pipe wrench—there was a blowtorch on board already—and some piping and a Teach Yourself Plumbing manual. I’m putting in a shower to use some of the waste heat and intercept some of the coolant water.”

“Huh,” Jayne said. “Didn’t know you knew half of them words.”

“I want to be able to spruce up a little,” Simon said. “We’re getting a visitor. Unfortunately we won’t be able to practice a carrier landing or a glide-in docking maneuver, but I can practice a shuttle-to-shuttle link. Ah, that should be your namesake now.”

Kaylee’s voice crackled over the Cortex link. “Serenity shuttle two here, hailing _Kaylee’s Good Boy_. Heya, Jayne. Real sorry you got killed. And if that ain’t somethin’ you hardly ever get to tell anyone to his face an’ all.”

“Much obliged. How’s everybody back home?”

“Well, kinda mostly sittin’ around drunk with a thousand-yard stare, ‘cept for Inara.”

“Who-all’s still there? Just Mal, you, Zo’ and Inara? Sounds like he got himself a Hay Rum at last.”

“Hired on some new folks,” Kaylee said. “In fact, once we’re done here, I’m going to pick ‘em up. New pilot, name of Chou, and another gunhand. Levi.”

Simon finished checking his space suit (right-side forward this time) and jetpack. He stepped from one airlock to the other through the boarding tunnel.

“You was gone ‘bout half an hour,” Jayne said when he returned. “Did ya dock her, Doc?”

“I don’t see how that would be any of your business even if you were still corporeal,” Simon told him.

6  
Simon cinched the sash of his houserobe and put the towel in the washing machine.

“You’re back,” Jayne said. “Why’d you put the shower over there?”

“Because it’s out of range of the internal sensors.”

“Yeah, like I cared even when I had all my parts attached. Mal was more my type than you was.”

“You *had* a type? No, wait, that sounds half wrong. You were interested in men?”

“Doc, whatever pocket a man keeps his standards in, his pecker ain’t in it. Wouldn’t have given you a tumble, though. What I like about men is, they’re straightforward. If I’d been havin’ to do with a fella like you, there’d be all the airs and graces that a girl expects, and not even a snatch to show for it. Plus, Mal’s hung better’n you are.”

Simon reflected that, if no man was a hero to his valet, he was even less so to his spaceship.

7  
The collision between his head and the top of the cupboard-bed woke Simon. He pressed the magnetic catch on the wall compartment, and had just enough time to grab the .38 before he was bounced to the floor. He yawned, was grateful to see that nothing was broken and that the safety was still on the gun, and noted that none of the alarms had gone off and they shouldn’t really have been close enough to anything to collide with it. He swarmed up the ladder to the cockpit. None of the gauges showed any abnormality. Simon yelled into the Input microphone. “Jayne! What the hell is going on?”

“I finally figured out how to jack off,” Jayne said. “It’s sorta like a Crazy Ivan, only funner.”

“Well, would you mind not doing that when we’re…this far out from a fuel station?”

8  
“Picnic!” Simon said cheerfully, courteously serving his partner first with a table d’hote of fuel cells before uncapping his own bento box. “We’ll have lunch, and then we’ll practice vertical takeoffs and landings and snapping to coordinates. I’ll be on comm when I’m out on my little escapades. Remember, stay in the hangar or the drop point unless I comm you to come and get me. And **don’t** come and get me if I use the word ‘introject’ in the message—that’s the signal that I’m under duress.”

9  
“You’re back,” Jayne said. “Hey, whose blood is that? Hard to tell on that dark shirt.”

“Mostly the other guy’s,” Simon said.

“Go on,” Jayne said. “I’m all ears.”

“Yes, you would be. I went to the café where the Resistance types used to hang out, and yes, stop gloating, nobody wanted to know. Then I went to the bar closest to the Staff Entrance for The Academy, and had a couple of drinks…”

“What were you drinkin’?”

“Bourbon. Ditch. Is that relevant?”

“Just want to know, is all. Least you didn’t get pummeled for asking for no pomegranate bubble tea.”

“No, I got pummeled dragging a man in a Utility uniform out into the alley. I knocked him down, got his hands into those plastic handcuffs, stole his Installation badge—although it’s probably decommissioned already—and put the gun in his face and told him that he’d better tell me if River Tam had been brought back to the Experimental wing.”

“And he laughed in your face and told you you didn’t have the stones to use that thing.”

“You’re strangely prescient, Jayne.”

“I’m always impressed by how you can keep gettin’ more pathetic every time you try.”

“Yeah,” Simon said, his voice half-drowned by the shower. “I’m in Badass correspondence school. In the bottom three percent.” Simon didn’t bother closing the shower curtain: the water got all over but the deck needed a good wash anyway. “Look, he said, crossing to the food prep unit and dry-swallowing pills from a locker niche, “In Mal’s job, he drew down on the Alliance. In mine, I drew down on death. We’re both outmanned, outgunned, and outgeneraled, but we’re still fighting. I’m going to get some sleep. And we’ll go out again tomorrow.”

10  
Jayne sat around and waited for a while, but just before the hangar rental ran out, he figured that CrazyGirl wasn’t going to get there, and the Doc wasn’t coming back. So he waved up Serenity. He was a little curious to see the new guys, but Inara answered, which was just as well.

“Oh, hello, Jayne,” she said (her training rendering her able to resume any conversation, no matter how long since it had commenced, or whether there had been a metallic role exchange in the middle). “As you see, I’m still here on Serenity.”

“How’s that workin’ out for you?” Jayne asked.

“It isn’t!” Inara said fervently. “My association with…with that pirate…burned all my bridges with the Guild, but I don’t know how much longer I can stand it here! That man is impossible!”

“Saw that comin’,” Jayne said. “Well, hell, ‘Nara, I got nothin’ but room here, and I got no use for money. You can hang up your furbelows on the walls, do your trade upstairs and live in the hold. There’s even a shower. Keep me fueled up, I’ll keep you in business.”

Sometimes but not very often Jayne wondered if he could have pulled the whole situation out of the fire. His conclusion was that he couldn’t. He didn’t have a fresh corpse, a repair shop, or the coin to get one to operate on the other. He wouldn’t sign up for an indefinite term sharing the control system with a backseat driver. Certainly there was no way he’d shift over and let Simon **become** _Kaylee’s Good Boy_. He’d just make the same mess of it that he made of being a man, and wouldn’t be half as good at it as Jayne was.

Jayne was sorry the way it turned out and all, but a man’s gotta do, what a man’s gotta do.


End file.
